As his latest fantasy film, The Zero Theorem, is released, Terry Gilliam
discusses Monty Python, Don Quixote, and his unhappy 'marriage' with the
Weinstein brothers

Terry Gilliam used to have a recurring dream that he could fly. Not soaring gracefully through the clouds, but zipping around a couple of feet above the ground. “I’m not a high flier,” he says, his face scrunched up with pleasure. “Under the radar is where I go!”

The dreams were so vivid that Gilliam would wake up exhausted, and he was convinced that he had a muscle memory of flying. One day, maybe 40 years ago, he decided to explore this possibility in the company of a friend. “I just had to get down on the ground to show this friend of mine that I could do it,” he says. “Course, I couldn’t. ‘Well, you can’t fly,’ he said. ‘You’re out of your mind, Terry.’ ” It was not the last time Gilliam would hear this diagnosis.

On first impressions, though, there is something reassuringly solid about Gilliam. We meet at a pub close to his home in Highgate, and he arrives wearing a brown sheepskin jacket, his grey beard trimmed close, a pair of glasses dangling from a string around his neck. His hair is short, save for a sort of rat-tail, a defiant tribute to the days when wearing your hair long could get you in trouble.

He has the wide, mischievous face of a goblin, or a particularly wicked boy. Jeff Bridges, who’s appeared in several of Gilliam’s films, has aptly described him as an “ancient child”: “ ‘child’ because he has retained the optimism, playfulness and bewilderment of a kid, and ‘ancient’ because there is a timeless, wizard vibe about him.”

Gilliam is one of the great cinematic fabulists of our time, architect of magnificently maximalist alternate universes, from the surreal dreamscapes of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus to the dirty, juddering dystopias of Brazil and 12 Monkeys, right back to the alarming, bulbous animations he created for Monty Python. In his 1988 film The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, the titular teller of tall tales puts forward a neat distillation of the Gilliam world-view: “Your reality, sir, is lies and balderdash, and I’m delighted to say I have no grasp of it whatsoever.”

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Gilliam is now 73. This year, should things go to plan, he is directing an opera, publishing an autobiography (or as he terms it, his “me-me-me-moir”), playing 10 nights at the O2 with Monty Python, promoting one film and shooting another. “The years are rushing away too quickly, and I’m getting close to death,” he says. “It’s nice to get a couple of things done before I go subterranean!” He can hardly get the words out for laughing.

Gilliam’s wife, Maggie, once suggested to him that he makes the same film over and over again. Gilliam admits as much in the case of his new one, The Zero Theorem, which was written by a creative writing professor named Pat Rushin.

“When I first read the script,” says Gilliam, “I just thought, here’s a guy who’s seen every film I’ve ever made.” He laughs. “And it was me in my elder years mode, where I thought, this could be a compendium, like Fanny and Alexander was for Bergman or Amarcord was for Fellini, because it’s dealing with ideas that I’ve thrown around for a while, ones that mean things to me.”

At the centre of the tale is Qohen, an anti-social apparatchik at ManCom, an invasive tech leviathan whose slogan is “Corporations sans frontières”. Qohen is beset with existential angst, convinced that he hung up the phone on someone who was going to tell him the meaning of life. To make things worse, he is set to work by his Steve Jobs-like boss, “Management” (Matt Damon), on a 3D game that involves manipulating equations with the ultimate aim of proving that life is pointless. “Brazil was about a political organisation,” says Gilliam, “but this is about something super-governmental, that has no interest really in the common weal, as we call it. It’s about profit.”

The star of the film is Christoph Waltz, and I make the mistake of saying that his performance – for which he shaved his head and eyebrows, and which involves his being zipped into a skin-tight satin bodysuit – is fearless. “I find these words like brave and fearless to be bulls---,” says Gilliam. “That’s what the job is, or you’re just a vain star who doesn’t want to do it. That’s why I’d be happier working with good actors than with stars.”

'Me in my elder years mode': A scene from The Zero Theorem

Although there’s a powerful strain of technophobia to the film, Gilliam can’t easily be pigeonholed as a Luddite. “I love my iPhone,” he says, waving his arms around. “It’s like the 2001 black monolith and I’m the ape! But it’s when technology becomes the new religion, when it dominates people’s lives to the extent that I believe it does now… I hate tweeting and watching people on their phones all the time. No one’s taking the world in any more, they’re using it as background material for themselves.” What will he do at the Monty Python shows, I ask, when 17,000 fans are taking pictures on their phones? “Maybe send some of the angry Russians from Crimea to run amok,” he suggests.

Qohen’s search for meaning in an infantile world is brought into sharper focus by the setting of much of the film: a burnt-out monastery, the faces of saints looming down from the walls. Gilliam was brought up to be religious; he was able to go to college thanks to a Presbyterian scholarship, and considered becoming a missionary to – as he says in a prim, strangulated voice – “see the world and do good, and bring Jesus to those little black people”. “I wouldn’t say I was a zealot – I’ve never been stupid,” he says. “But I can honestly say I’ve read the Bible twice, the whole way through. Between the Bible and Grimm’s Fairy Tales, that’s all one needs in life.”

He lost his faith when he was still a teenager. “I was irreverent,” he says. “I would joke about God, Jesus and his mates. And those in the church were uncomfortable with my jokes, and as I said, what kind of god do you believe in that can’t take a joke? This big, all-powerful – what the f--- does he care what I say?”

Gilliam wasn’t always pegged as a subversive. He was born in Minnesota in 1940, the eldest of three children. “I got in there first, marked out my territory,” he says unabashedly. “I just seemed to be brighter, quicker, all those things. Not that they were idiots, but I was always ahead of them. I was head cheerleader – one of the guys that hold the girls – student body president, valedictorian, king of the senior prom. That is gold beyond gold.”

He had the ability, even then, to turn disaster to his advantage. “I guess I always did make people laugh, usually because I failed,” he says. “When I tried to be a magician, tricks would go wrong, and I’d have to turn it round and make it seem intentional. Da-dah! When I was a pole-vaulter in high school, occasionally some of the ways I tangled myself up on the crossbar many metres up in the air became funny. And I got a laugh, thank you very much ladies and gentleman.”

And now for something completely different: a typical Gilliam image for Monty Python

Throughout his childhood, Gilliam was a voracious reader of comics. “I’ve got a cartoonist’s eye,” he says. “I see the grotesque, my eye goes for the odd thing in a scene, then emphasises it.” He copied cartoons from Mad magazine, and struck up a correspondence with its then-editor, Harvey Kurtzman. It was while working on another Kurtzman magazine, Help!, that he met John Cleese for the first time. Gilliam was in charge of the photographic comic strips known as fumettis. In 1965 he cast Cleese in a fumetti entitled “Christopher’s Punctured Romance”, as a man who develops a passion for his daughter’s Barbie doll.

When Gilliam wound up in England a few years later – “If I’d stayed in America I was gonna be throwing bombs,” he says, “and I’m a better cartoonist than terrorist” – he contacted Cleese, and the rest, pretty much, is history.

Returning to Monty Python to prepare for the live shows has not been an unequivocally joyful experience. “Eric [Idle] had put a running order together, a script, and we just started doing it, and suddenly it was like 40 years had never happened,” says Gilliam. “Well, it’s a part that I don’t want any more. I was the animator. And I was the part-time grotesque performer; anything that involved uncomfortable make-up that nobody else wanted to do, I could add a certain… texture. But I’m not in their league as far as performing goes. The things I do, I think I can do quite well. But it’s not filling me with excitement to be” – he switches to a camp, theatrical voice – “back on the boards.”

Directing was, says Gilliam, always what he wanted to do. His first solo effort, which came out in 1977, was Jabberwocky, a scatological Dark Ages fantasy that had only the loosest connection to the Lewis Carroll poem (it had a monster in it). He was filming at Shepperton when George Lucas was filming Star Wars at Elstree, and the two productions shared crew. “I remember our crew would go some days and work on Star Wars, and come back saying, ‘Jabberwocky’s going to be great; Star Wars, the director doesn’t know what he’s doing.’ They were so proud to be working on Jabberwocky, they wore T-shirts with the name on, until Star Wars came out. Off went the Jabberwocky T-shirts, on with the Star Wars T-shirts.”

The fickleness of Hollywood is a subject you feel Gilliam could expound upon ad infinitum. His struggles with the “middle-range bureaucrats” who run the place have become the stuff of legend, because Gilliam has never been afraid to engage them in battle. In 1985, Universal producer Sid Sheinberg asked him to hack away 50 minutes from Brazil and give it a happy ending. In response, Gilliam took out a full-page advertisement in the trade paper, Variety, reading: “Dear Sid Sheinberg, When are you going to release my movie, Brazil?” Then there was the episode in 2006 when, aggrieved at the lack of marketing support for his film, Tideland, Gilliam wandered the streets wearing a cardboard placard reading: “Studio-less film maker – Family to support – Will direct for food.”

Gilliam used to jet over to Los Angeles to pitch his stories to the studios, but not any more. “I’ve cut my ties, I don’t even have an agent out there,” he says. “I used to go out there with my begging bowl in my hands. And you’d go to these meetings with these executives and you’d get this preamble of five minutes of how much they’ve loved all my films, when they were kids, Time Bandits, it goes on and on. And then you present the new film and they say, ‘Well, I don’t know, I don’t quite get this one.’ And I have to tell them,” he says, wagging his finger, “ Nobody got those other ones either!” Gilliam is still a member of the Academy, and submitted votes for this year’s Oscars: “I just vote for my friends, or do it whimsically, or out of spite in some cases.”

Is there anyone in Hollywood he respects, I wonder? “I had a great time on Brazil with Arnon Milchan,” he says, “the world’s favourite Israeli spy.” He’s not joking: Milchan, the head of New Regency, whose hundreds of production credits include 12 Years a Slave, LA Confidential and Once Upon a Time in America, recently admitted in an interview that he’d been a spy in an earlier life. “He was actually in the arms business,” says Gilliam, cheerfully. “I don’t care where the money comes from. It’s all dirty money as far as I’m concerned!”

If he’d go into business with an arms dealer, I say, is there anyone he wouldn’t take money from? He looks thoughtful. “It’s getting harder.” He winces. “Unfortunately I got caught with the Weinstein brothers. That was not a happy experience. It was not a marriage made in heaven. They’re great salesmen but they want to be film-makers. Stick to selling, let the film-makers do the films.” (For his 2005 film The Brothers Grimm, Bob Weinstein insisted on replacing Samantha Morton as the leading actress, and fired Gilliam’s cinematographer.)

The producer of Gilliam’s next film is a 29-year-old Spanish wunderkind. “Yeah,” says Gilliam, “he’s young, foolish… determined!” The film, set to start shooting in September, is The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. It is the latest chapter in a saga that began almost 20 years ago. The first time around, Gilliam simply called a producer friend of his: “I said, I’ve got two names for you, and I need $20 million. One is Quixote, the other’s Gilliam. He says, done.” He laughs. “And then I sat down to read the book.” Wait, I say, you hadn’t read it first? “Nobody reads that book,” he says, and then again, more vigorously: “Nobody reads that book! But we all know about Quixote, and the windmills and the mad man who misinterprets reality.”

Over the years he has written and rewritten the script. “It’s moved on,” he says. “It becomes in some way more autobiographical, and sometimes more pragmatic – fewer big scenes! Now it’s genuinely better. And it’s really about how movies can f--- up people’s lives.”

A couple of days after we meet, I read that Johnny Depp, a friend and ally to Gilliam since they worked together on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), had sold his own version of Don Quixote to Disney. This seems like treachery, and I send Gilliam an email asking how he feels about it. His reply reaches me the next day: “There have been many Don Quixotes in the past and there will be many more in the future but, for the present there is only one The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.” You can’t keep Gilliam down for long.